ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses three very productive morphological processes in Polish: comparative degree formation, imperative formation, and augmentative back-formation. It demonstrates that, contrary to the assumptions of the linear and the lexical models, these rules must operate not on underlying or intermediate structures, but on the output of all word-level rules, i.e. on phonetic forms. In the first two cases the suggested procedure enables simple, general formulations of word formation rules (WFRs), while in the third instance it allows for the correct derivation of augmentative nouns without the need to morphologize well-established phonological rules. In the traditional generative framework WFRs operate on morphological structures, which are identical with phonological representations. The chapter examines some WFRs in Polish in terms of the exact nature of input forms, of which three possibilities will be considered: phonological, lexical and phonetic. It discusses a more complex process, i.e., that of forming imperatives, which also seems sensitive to the phonetic structure of the input strings.
